Collaborating with the right partner can change the outcome of an event for the better — it can help attract new audiences, decrease costs, and boost brand authority. But how do you start a partnership? How do you attract the right partners, get them to commit, and then get the most value out of it?
In this Run of Show video, Splash's CEO Ben Hindman discusses how to make the most of your event partnerships so it's a win-win for everyone involved.
Love the animation in this video? Check out Ink Factory.
Are you looking for partners and sponsors for your next event? Well, listen up. Today, we're gonna walk through my strategy for attracting and signing terrific partners.
My secret weapon when throwing events is to partner up, early and often. It's how I've accomplished some of the most extravagant events I've ever thrown on a shoestring budget.
Partners are incredible — they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?
The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you want to pitch that partner, and then you really want to lock it in. We're going to walk through each three of those things right now.
Finding the right partner is one of the most important things you can do, and it's relatively simple. You are looking for somebody who shares a similar audience set to what you have. Somebody who is targeting a similar audience. If they want to reach your audience and you want to reach theirs, there's a strong likelihood that they're going to be a good partner.
And the hope is that they can be a loudspeaker for you. I love partnering with media companies, so if you can find a digital publisher or a broadcaster, some sort of online presence with an audience, that's a great partner, and that's a partner that you want to bring on for potentially free.
They also might be able to sell advertisement and bring on a liquor sponsor or additional sponsors. I love partnering with publishers.
Ask yourself first: Are they worth the trouble? Do they have bandwidth? Do they have money? Do they have time? Are they willing to work with you on this?
I'll save you a whole bunch of time right now. If you're trying to identify a partner, and you're trying to get them to work with you, and it's like pushing a boulder up a mountain, I would say move along. The path of least resistance is always the one with partnerships. If they're into it, they're going to work with you, and if they're not into it, you need to just move along and find a different partner. I'm telling you, I just saved you a lot of time.
Let's say you've found the right partner, and you're ready to rock, and you really want to get them on board. The next step is the pitch. What I'd recommend is thinking about the pitch in four different steps.
1. Send them an email.
Quick and to the point, show that you're all business and you're going to host an incredible event. The best way to do so is to identify who is going to be there. Think about who that partner wants to target and include that in the subject line or in the first sentence of your email for who is going to be at this event.
2. Get them on the phone.
A quick, 15-minute phone call is all you need, and in this process, you're going to ask them a lot of the questions that you're going to need in order to create a one-sheet to pitch them on.
Now, you're going to have to have created this one-sheet template beforehand. I can't stress this enough — don't send them the one-sheet or a deck before you get on a call with them, because they're going to answer a lot of the most important questions on that first call. Get that one-sheet ready, but send it right after the call. And along with the one-sheet, or as a follow-up to the one-sheet, you're really going to want to identify all the steps: what do they need to do to sign up and what will they need to do to make this partnership successful.
3. Give them event details that feel real.
What you're going to want to do is really bring this event to life. Give it a title. Make it feel like an event. Don't forget: An event has a date. It has a time. That's what an event has. It has specifics, and details, and logistics already baked in.
Even if those are TBD, don't make them TBD. Give at least work-in-progress text. Then what you want to do is outline the when and the where of the event. If it's a cool venue, take pictures of the venue, throw that right on the one-sheet. Again, you want to make this feel very real.
Who is going to be at this event? You want to brag here. You're going to have celebrities, VIPs, influencers, press, clients, prospects. You might even go as far as to list all of the different titles of the people who will be attending, or maybe even attendees from previous events is a great place to put here. You really want to brag about your audience or at least your target audience.
You want to get people excited about this event. Don't forget: They need to fall in love with this event in order to partner with you on it.
4. Tell them what's in it for them.
Lastly, outline the benefits that they're going to get. Are they going to get access to the list after the event? VIP tickets? Are they going to get inclusion in pre- and post-event promotion? Are they going to get logos on the website? What are they going to get by partnering with you on this event?
You want to list out all those things on a one-sheet, not a deck. A one-sheet is one sheet. If you can put this in a one-sheet and put it in somebody's inbox, even, copy and paste it into the email, you're going to find that you're going to have a much higher hit rate. Again, you're going to send that one-sheet after that first phone call.
Now, let's say that you got this partner excited, and they're ready to go. This is the important next step. To lock them in, there's only one way to lock in any partnership, and it's with a contract. You need to get that signature. We also have great templates of our partnership contracts. So take a look at those. You don't need to reinvent the wheel there. There are some great templates.
The next step to locking it in is to treat every partner really like a sponsor. Whether or not they're adding value or they're giving you money, you need to treat them as if they have really paid to be part of this event.
That means consistent follow-up emails. That means being attentive to their needs. That means sending them a really beautiful recap report after the event. I find that if I treat my partners like sponsors and I really put that in my brain and in the brains of the people on my team, I get a lot more out of that partnership. They end up coming to the table and really delivering the value that I originally expected.
Last but not least, own it. Own the entire process. I’ve found that the best way to really get the most out of a partnership is to put one person on your team on that partner. Make sure that reminder email goes out. Make sure they bring their brand VIPs. Make sure that they have strong collateral at the event, and that their booth is set up on time. It's that type of stuff. Giving them a very clear and thoughtful Gantt chart, leading them through that process ... that really squeezes all of the juice out of a potential partnership.
That's how I think about executing a strong partnership strategy for my events. I try to find partnerships that share our audience, I try to pitch them with a one-sheet, and then I try to lock them in with a contract and a thoughtful plan for next steps. As I said, this has been my secret weapon. It's been how I've been able to grow my entire attendee list.
Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.
